


Home is where one starts from

by Ruta



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Choices, Clarke Griffin Doesn't Leave, F/M, Guilt, Hopeful Ending, My own 2x16, Post-Mount Weather
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23881069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruta/pseuds/Ruta
Summary: She sees him put his hand on the rifle’s handle which hangs on his right shoulder to prevent it from bouncing too much and give her a sidelong glance. She noticed him do it even earlier, turn in her direction and look for her in the crowd from afar, squinting against the daylight to focus on her. It’s hismodus operandi:frame, focus and shoot. It is no coincidence that he is a skilled hunter, a sharpshooter. A couple of years and he will be a warrior of renowned fierceness even among the twelve clans."Just so you know," he says mulishly, "I would have lowered that lever with you."What he's saying is that he wouldn't let her do it alone. He wouldn’t let the burden of that impossible choice fall solely on her shoulders.(Clarke doesn't irradiate Mount Weather. She makes a different choice.)
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 6
Kudos: 211





	Home is where one starts from

"None of us has a choice here, Clarke."

 _No_ , she thinks and the burning sensation in the chest spreads to the throat; she can taste the bile in her mouth. _That is a coward’s alibi._

The gun is as heavy and cold in her hand as the radio in the other, yet they fit perfectly, as complementary appendages. She takes aim for a clean shot (not as accurate and quick as would be one in the head, between the eyes), pulls the trigger, then lowers her arm instead.

"We all have a choice," she replies, and her voice sounds like the gunshot that she never fired. In her mind an explosion ignites the darkness of the night with flowers of fire. A cloud of dirt, the stink of burnt bodies, blood and guilt, collapsed buildings and a labyrinth of rubble to go through incognito and under the cover of darkness. "Everything else is the excuse behind which we hide our selfishness."

She rests the gun and the radio on the table and turns her back on Dante. Out of the corner of her eye she sees Bellamy approaching and tying him with some kind of rope.

As she stares at the real-time videos from the security cameras, she feels numb and overwhelmed with nausea. Her medical skills allow her to transform what she sees into information that decrees the need to speed up an urgent reaction. Raven is young and strong, but she won't survive more than an hour on that operating table. She doesn’t need to watch it happen to know it.

Irradiate Level 5 is really the only choice?

 _Think_ , she tells herself, massaging her forehead soaked in cold sweat. _Think_. Her eyes flicker towards the monitor that shows the corridor where Cage and Emerson are.

"I know that look." Bellamy moves to stand next to her. "Would you like to share?"

"The background music." She points to the monitor showing the refectory. "There were speakers in the dormitory and the refectory. Can you hack into the sound systems?” she asks Monty.

Monty's eyes widen slightly before he nods and gets back to work.

Bellamy stands with his arms folded and in the silver dimness his face is tense like a mask. "I’m sure talking isn’t what you have in mind."

“No, no more talking with the wrong people.”

He nods, looking angry. He must have already guessed what this is about, and it doesn’t surprise her in the least. “That’s a risky plan.”

They have to try, even if it’s risky. She breathes in and breathes out, though her nostrils. From the corner where he is restrained, she can feel the glare of Dante's piercing eyes on her. "It’s a different choice."

*

"If you talk in here, they'll hear you," Monty explains and places a microphone in front of her. Connected to it is the walkie-talkie programmed to broadcast on all radio frequencies.

"Cage as well?" In the dormitory, meanwhile, her mother struggles on the operating table.

"The entire level 5," Monty assures. "I checked. Network cameras have an integrated audio functionality."

"And you can-"

Again, Monty takes the hint. "Tell me when you want me to divert the radio signal to the dormitory,” he says.

Bellamy's reaches over, taking her hand and it’s perceiving the heat that spreads from his palm, stealing a bit of that warmth, that she realizes for the first time how cold she was.

"You can do it," he says, and she believes him, squeezing it back.

*

_My name is Clarke Griffin. I was born in space and together with a hundred I was sent to Earth because we were the only hope of survival for our people._

_I was kidnapped and held against my will in this facility. I managed to escape, not before I found out that your life is a lie. Many of you don't know or pretend they don't know how you managed to survive for so long. You chose to live in ignorance because it was a better alternative than to face the chilling truth, make yourself accomplices aware of what is really happening, accept that yours are stolen lives, that you are blood-drinkers and murderers. You think you are at peace when in fact you have always been at war._

_All this ends today, here and now. While you dine, my people are being tortured and killed on the order of Cage Wallace. Can you hear? That was my mother while her bone marrow is being extracted from her without anaesthesia. She isn’t the only one. There are kids the same age of your daughters and sons chained to the walls while they wait their turn. If I don't stop them, they will die. I can't allow it. I have no choice but to irradiate the whole level. Unlike you, we will survive. Being born and lived in space made us immune to this level of radiation. I offered a deal to your president. The safety of my people for yours. He refused. I offer you the same choice. When leaders begin to put their personal interests first, it means that it’s time to depose them, that they have lost the right to speak for us._

_Act accordingly but know this. You have thirty minutes. If my people will not be released within thirty minutes, I will lower the lever. I will radiate the mountain. Thirty minutes. Choose wisely._

*

"Clever, so, what now?" Monty asks after he has pressed the button to end the audio message.

Clarke puts down the walkie-talkie connected to the microphone. Releases a breath she hadn't noticed she was holding. Her shoulders are so stiff that her muscles ache at the slightest movement, the fingers of her left hand are sore. Despite this, she doesn't let go of Bellamy's hand. She meets his gaze. His jaw is clenched, and his mouth pulled downwards as if no longer remembers being able to assume a different shape.

"Now, we wait," he answers, voicing her own thought.

*

They wait, watching with bated breath the people in the refectory when they begin to abandon their activities to get up and grab blunt objects and improper weapons. They watch Octavia kill two guards in a corridor. When she and Maya reach the refectory, most people are standing by then and are huddling at the exit, heading for the dormitory.

"It's working," Bellamy says and she doesn't stop to think about the puzzled expression he regards her. (It is not the first time that he looks at her with that intense gaze of silent awe, like he has difficulty making sense of what is right in front of him, but she doesn’t remember it. How could she? She has always been too aware of her duty to focus on the present, too projected on the future and on the consequences to recognize that kind of feelings refractory to the lability of time.)

"We did it." Unlike Bellamy, the incredulous surprise and relief that make its way onto Monty's face are easy to recognize. Monty is an open book.

"Not yet."

When Bellamy lets go of her hand and walks towards the door, she instinctively follows him.

"Where are you going?" she asks, even if part of her has already understood. Sometimes she has the impression of knowing him better than she knows herself and anticipates his reactions with an ease that instead of upsetting her has a stabilizing effect. (And isn't it absurd to realize that she has known him for two months? Only two months. Barely two months. Two months and he has already become part of her, one of the best things that could ever happen to her and god, _god_ , how much she _hates_ him for it, how much she would like to hate him.)

"They plan to storm the dormitory relying on their numerical superiority, but Cage and his men are armed. They need someone to lead them. They have war in their blood, but they never fought before in their lives."

If she were a different person, she would try to hold him back and that’s exactly the point. _She is not a different person_. Both will always give priority to the people they have promised to protect and that’s why, instead of stand in his way and begging him not to go, she grabs the gun. "Take this," she says and hands it to him.

"Bellamy," calls him back before he leaves. He turns to look over his shoulder, their eyes meet in mid-air and for a moment she recognizes her own feelings, sees them reflected and amplified in his eyes. They are a warm brown, a murkier shade of umber, enough to resemble carbon black, the pupils dilated to the point of having made the iris a thin ring. "Be careful."

He twists his mouth as he always does when he is about to say something problematic, that he doesn’t know how to handle. "If I don't come back-"

She shakes her head. "Don’t say that."

"You know what you have to do," he goes as if she hadn't interrupted him and for a split second his eyes move to the right, towards the lever, before returning to her, sharp and relentless. The words they contain have still a new flavour and he doesn't need to pronounce them to make them true. They are the same ones that she has felt trapped on the tip of her tongue from the moment she glimpsed the hurt that crossed his gaze when she let him believe that he was expandable to her, since she found herself with a radio in her hand counting the days and years contained in the minutes that make up three hours, since she saw him for the first time in flesh and blood after she let the enemy bomb a city, hiding behind the logic that the end justifies the means. She looks at him and all she can see is the epitome of her weakness, but also the depth of her strength.

After he is gone, Clarke positions herself in front of the lever and watches the riot she instigated without the slightest satisfaction. Her hands are cold and empty, her arms rigid and motionless at her sides.

*

When the fighting is over, Bellamy turns to the camera in the dormitory, dishevelled and slightly bleeding. He has a cut on his temple, a split lip and a couple of wounds caused by Emerson before he got the better of him. Clarke knows that he’s looking at her, that she’s the one he is addressing that crooked smile dripping with tiredness and that is an oxymoron, because it is partly exhilaration and reassurance and partly all that is its opposite.

Clarke burst out laughing, holding a hand to her mouth and it's a querulous laugh that tastes like tears. Monty screams with joy, raises his arms, punches in the air, gets up to hug her and -

"I underestimated you," says Dante, his eyes red and mournful. He is not looking at her, but at Bellamy and whatever he is thinking, his forehead is wrinkled in a concentrated expression that in addition to the obvious aversion seems to contain a semblance of riotous approval. "You balance each other in an effective and powerful combination. Where one doesn’t reach, the other provides."

Dante returns his eyes to her and her skin crawls. The idea that others can read them that far is frankly terrifying. "He is loyal to you. That kind of devotion can turn into a double-edged sword. Remember, Clarke. We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.”

*

When she and Monty set foot in the dorm they are greeted with jubilant exclamations and pats on the shoulder. People embrace each other, rescue the wounded, free those who are still chained. They are bloody, tattered, dirty and seem to barely stand on their legs, but they are alive. There are Miller and his father, Raven and Wick and -

"Clarke," says her mother, and she blinks quickly to dispel the tears that are piling up at the edges, blurring her vision. She approaches the table on which she is half-lying and lets her place her hands on the sides of her face, enclosing it as she vaguely remembers that she used to do when she was a child. Once upon a time her mother's hands covered it in its entirety, easily circumscribing it.

"We heard you," Kane intervenes. "What you did was..." he shakes his head with one of his reserved smiles. "I don't even know how to define it."

"Brilliant," Monty says. He has an arm around Harper's shoulders and is beaming. "It was brilliant."

"The important thing is that it worked," she replies and tries not to think about the alternative, not to shiver at the thought of what she has been one step away from committing.

"Would you have done it, or it was just a bluff?" Jasper's voice is loud and brusque enough to get an instinctive reaction of silence around them, pausing any other conversations. She turns around. Suddenly everyone's eyes are on her and the atmosphere of elation has now taken on elusive hues.

"Jasper," Maya says softly, pulling him by the arm as if she wanted to stop him from adding more. Clarke meets her gaze and can see that, besides the usual kindness, there is something vague in the way she is looking at her that wasn’t there before. It is not exactly fear, but a kind of circumspection mixed with distrust. _As if she was scared._ Her stomach twists painfully.

"Would you have irradiated the mountain?" Jasper insists harshly. His hand is still stained with blood and is closed around the switchblade with which he stabbed Cage in the throat. (The memory of this experience is a wound that will never heal. It is a feeling that she knows for having felt it on her own skin. The estrangement. The shiver of horror that arises in the soul and unrolls like a snake aroused by the brutality of an act for which there can be no forgiveness. A war crime remains a crime, whether it goes unpunished or not.) "Would you really have killed them all?"

What's the point of lying? “Yes.” She doesn't add anything else, doesn't explain that for them she would be willing to do even worse. Indeed, she already did, didn't she?

"Why it doesn't surprise me?"

She feels the hand that her mother has placed between her shoulder blades, her silent way to support her. Even if it was her who spoke, it is not Octavia's unnerving gaze that she looks for in the group of survivors that surrounds her but the dark one of the boy she is sure to find behind his sister.

"After all, you let that missile destroy Tondc. More than two hundred died. Your hands are stained with their blood."

When she finds the eyes she was looking for, there is no disgust, only dismay. Her mouth seems full of ash.

"I did what I had to," she replies without tearing her eyes from Bellamy. "Otherwise Bellamy's cover would have blown."

He doesn’t flinch and although his face doesn’t display conflict, she sees how his mouth is twitching, as if he had swallowed an incredibly bitter bite.

"So, you did that to save my brother that _you_ sent on a potentially suicidal mission because _you_ decided he was expendable," says Octavia, her lips thin and curl back in a snarl of rage. "What makes you believe you have the right to choose who lives and who dies?"

"O, that's enough," says Bellamy in a forceful tone that brooks no argument, the same one he perfected with the delinquents to keep them in line when he had to communicate the guard shifts and the week’s duties of patrol, collection, cooking and construction. He closes a hand around his sister's tiny shoulder.

Clarke doesn’t stay to hear the rest and heads for the exit. Nobody tries to hold her back. It feels like she’s walking on an invisible watershed.

*

Clarke closes the line of survivors who slowly walk the road home.

Bellamy joins her after an hour, with his towering height he shields her from the sun's rays, offering her a respite of refreshment.

It has a liberating effect to no longer be surrounded by concrete and metal, to breathe in the wind the smells of the woods and foliage magnified by the humidity, familiar scents that she instinctively associates with an illusion of peace. War is after all fire and iron steel and the acrid taste of fear against the teeth.

The sun beats on their heads, strong and relentless despite it’s already late autumn. Beads of sweat glint on Bellamy’s collarbones, his hair unruly and flattened on the temples in curls that look like commas sprayed by an intense golden reflection. Her fingers itch for the desire to remove them from his forehead and neck, leave her hand there and use her thumb to apply concentrated pressure on the tension knots.

She sees him put his hand on the rifle’s handle which hangs on his right shoulder to prevent it from bouncing too much and give her a sidelong glance. She noticed him do it even earlier, turn in her direction and look for her in the crowd from afar, squinting against the daylight to focus on her. It’s his _modus operandi_ : frame, focus and shoot. It is no coincidence that he is a skilled hunter, a sharpshooter. A couple of years and he will be a warrior of renowned fierceness even among the twelve clans.

"Just so you know," he says mulishly, "I would have lowered that lever with you."

What he's saying is that he wouldn't let her do it alone. He wouldn’t let the burden of that impossible choice fall solely on her shoulders.

Clarke swallows hard. She would like to cry but she will not, not here where she feels exposed to the curiosity of prying and merciless looks. She must be more exhausted than she thought. Fatigue weighs down her steps, slowing her mental processes because she is tempted to do something immensely stupid like brushing his wrist to make sure there is a beat. Since they both seem unable to turn into words what they represent to each other, there is no other way to make him understand that -

"My sister was in Tondc. Did you know?"

Clarke doesn’t freeze, even if for a moment the luxuriant vegetation becomes a desolate quagmire. She doesn't turn to look at him, she doesn't need to. She would be able to portray him based on memory alone, the haunted and ferocious profile enriched by a scenery that in her imagination is starry, like the effigy of a _princeps_ on the bronze coin of a fallen Empire.

Her heart beats faster, wildly. "Yes."

Bellamy nods, stays with her a little longer before he goes back to Octavia. Clarke watches him walk away, squinting to see him better. (Bad balance, blurred vision and headache, she lists the symptoms with practicality, but it wasn't a sunstroke that caused them.)

*

After Monty, she knows that the next goodbye will not be as easy to manage. Nothing ever is between them.

Bellamy lingers near the gate before approaching her and she wonders how long it will take before he can forgive her for what she has done, if he will ever overcome the grudge he must feel for endangering Octavia’s life, if he will ever look at her how he used to. The prospect of a hermit life in the forest continues to be tempting in comparison to the alternative. _Feel lonely even in his company._

"I can't stay," she says and sees how she caught him off guard.

Bellamy is good at masking his reactions, at bottling up his emotions. He smooths his forehead with a demonstration of will power, but the scowl doesn’t disappear completely, the echo remains in his stormy gaze. "Why not?"

"You don’t understand."

"Then help me understand."

"Every time I close my eyes," she hates how her voice sounds shallow, she hates the space between them although there is less than one meter to divide them, she hates everything she has done and above all else she hates the fact that she doesn’t regret it, “I see their faces, I hear their screams. Every time I open them, I see the loathing and contempt in Octavia and Jasper's eyes, and I remember the monster I’ve become.”

"Do you think it's not the same for me?" The expression on his face, frowning glance and frustrated desire, tells a tale all its own. “I killed a man, a family man in that mountain. I would like to say that he was the only one. Kill not to be killed. What we do to survive-"

"Doesn’t define us," she says. She lets her gaze wander beyond Bellamy, towards what she fails to call home. Now it only seems a cage in which she would be trapped if she decides to come inside.

"Please, don't go." She doesn’t immediately turn to him; she continues to dissect the fences. “Do you remember what you said to me on our way to Tondc? I feel the same way. I can't do it without you. Not because I think I can’t but because I don’t want."

"Bellamy..." she mutters. He must see it on her face, her flesh is torn, her bones are weary. She feels unsteady as if she had drunk a whole flask of moonshine. He must recognize the signs, he must have understood that his words broke through the armour that began to be built after Finn's death and Lexa's betrayal, since the ring of fire when she thought she had killed him, because he grabs her by the shoulders and moves so that he fills her entire field of vision, until the world is reduced to the freckles that sprinkle his nose and cheekbones in a horizontal line and that the sun has made more obvious in his tanned complexion.

"Listen, just hear me out, all right?" he says, his voice hoarse and assertive. “We're in this together. I know that you feel cornered, but we’ll figure it out. I promise you."

Chin trembling, with a heartfelt sigh she asks, "Together?"

His micro-expression of anxiety is swept away by one of relief and, it seems to her, of triumphant pride. "Together," he promises and embraces her tightly.

*

The collision is accidental or so Clarke initially thinks. She has enough alertness to cushion the impact by falling on her knees. She gets up and is studying the damage on her palms when she realizes that the boy who pushed her is still there and looks at her with barely repressing rage. He is not one of the hundred and this is the only consolation. It allows her to face his glare of hatred without signs of abating. The words he speaks to her are full of disgust, anger, venom. His name is Nelson, she remembers in a flash of recognition. His father died during the bombing of Tondc.

She doesn't react. Later she will recognize that it was a counterproductive and regrettable mistake not to defend herself, but at the time she doesn’t know how she could. She doesn't even intend to. How do you respond to a provocation when part of you thinks you deserve it?

In the end, the voice of reason manifests itself in the well-timed arrival of Bellamy who grabs Nelson by the front of the shirt and shakes him, orders him peremptorily, "Hey, cut the crap."

Nelson doesn't seem particularly cooperative, but Bellamy just bends over to whisper something in his ear and any trace of struggle evaporate. The boy’s face acquires a very strange tone, tending to greenish. Whatever Bellamy threat must have made to him, the deterrent effect is portentous. Nelson doesn't give her a second look and walks away with his head down, dodging badly the people who were visibly eavesdropping.

Now that Nelson is gone, Clarke notices for the first time that what should have been a private conversation has attracted more attention than she had anticipated. Although it’s dinner time, there is a bunch a people, not a large number, but enough to make her stiffen. _‘Cause they preferred to observe choosing not to intervene._

The look in their eyes is something she’s gotten used to in the past month and is the reason why she has turned into an essentially crepuscular person. Her days begin when those of most of the camp end. While the rest of the people drag themselves into their quarters after a hard day's work, Clarke runs through empty corridors, covers the night shifts in the medbay. There are days, _nights_ , when she feels like she has turned into a ghost, little more than a grey shadow cast upon a wall.

Under Bellamy's powerful look, even the latest witnesses seem to get the message and leave quickly.

She doesn’t know how to feel to discover that she is considered as an enemy among her own people.

"They hate me," she says flatly. _When did it happen?_

"They don’t hate you," Bellamy retorts. Clarke turns to him and is not surprised to find that he was already looking at her. Just because it’s addressed to her, his gaze has not softened, on the contrary it seems to have darkened. He has his hands on his hips and a tiny frown between his eyebrows. “They hate what happened and haven't yet figured out how to deal with it. They are looking for a scapegoat because they think that blaming someone will make it easier to get over it."

"Why don't you hate me?" The words come out before she can mitigate them in something less direct.

He doesn't blink. "What makes you think I don't?"

Quite right. For a moment she forgot her place. She knows how to recognize a setback. She turns her back on him so she doesn't notice the way Bellamy narrows his eyes and the rare glow that goes through them, how he stretched out an arm to stop her and then let it fall against his side in an afterthought, closing his hand into a fist.

(He has kept his promise. Even if their schedules reduce their interactions considerably, he is close to her in the only way that she has allowed him, that she can accept right now. Not a day goes by that, returning home shortly after 'dawn, she doesn’t find a snack left on the table. The passage of him easily found in the bed redone, in the boots cleaned of mud, in the freshly laundered clothes, in the mended socks. Sheets that retain his scent and a side of the bed that is always warm when she slips under the covers and that attracts her with the driving force of a magnet.)

She didn't even take two steps when his voice reaches her, low and honest like it hasn't been since the day they returned from Mount Weather. "I can't," she hears him say and wonders what he is referring to, if actually he is talking about their current situation, this stalled life made of stolen moments and unspoken sentences, deafening silences and quiet nights, misty dawns. “I tried to hate you. My sister could have died. For some reason, I couldn't."

She has to see his face. She has to see it, not to understand, but to make sure it’s as she thinks, that the old affection that shines through his voice has returned.

She whirls and Bellamy shrugs, his smirk is dearer to her than the brightest star in the winter sky. “Learn to live with it, princess. At this point, the odds of make me hate you are zero."

She bites the inside of her cheek. "There must be something you wouldn't forgive me for."

Bellamy approaches her and is looking at her from above, looming over her in a way that is not imposing, but the exact opposite, as if he wanted to protect her from the cruelty of the world, to shelter her. "Why do you want to know? To test my patience?"

Clarke shakes her head. "No. For the opposite reason. I would try to avoid it. To know how far I can go. "

"Why is it so important that I have your back?"

"You know why."

He raises a brow. "I know?"

Suddenly something has changed. She feels it. There is a friction that there wasn’t before, like a contracture, a stillness, as if the air were on fire and she perceives the violent embrace of that brushfire under the skin. "Stop it," she orders dryly.

The boyish enthusiasm has disappeared. His eyebrows are scrunched, and he is all frowny and mad. To anyone else it would be pretty much just his regular face. Not to her. “I never thought of you as a coward. I guess there is a first time for everything."

Clarke crosses her arms over her chest. "What do you want from me, Bellamy?"

"Everything. Nothing,” he immediately answers. “Not this kind of farce. What scares you?" he asks, lowering his voice and leaning dangerously forward. She can feel his breath against her cheek. It would be so easy to turn her face to the right angle.

What scares her? _Kissing cold and dead lips, watching his eyes wide open and blind, his blood on her hands and his corpse at her feet._

She looks at him with tear-stained eyes. Instead of answering, she run away.

*

After they released Finn's ashes in the cemetery behind the dropship, Clarke lingers in front of Wells' grave and cries. No matter what she did, the mistakes she made, what’s waiting for her, even if it wasn’t her fault, Wells will always remain one of her deepest regrets.

Emerging from the woods a little later, Clarke stops to observe the people gathered around the bonfire, what remains of the hundred. Octavia with her head resting on Lincoln's lap. Monty and Harper sitting close together. Miller, Jasper and Monroe who, while making toasts, exchange amusing anecdotes about the first months spent on Earth, before the adults arrived. Raven is a little far from the group, same as Bellamy, but her throaty laughter resounds often enough and occasionally her fingers touch the empty box that until a couple of hours earlier contained Finn's ashes.

The fire illuminates the night intensely, casting on everyone faces shadows that for the first time don’t seem sinister. On the contrary, they have something bright, warm and soften the thinness. It lightens them from the traumas they have experienced and makes them young and carefree again.

Clarke doesn’t come close immediately. She prefers to stay where she is, to savour that rare moment of peace. She finally feels that can really be an after. Turn the page is possible and even if forgetting is not, she can forgive herself and move on.

When they laid down for the night, she tiptoes and goes to sit in the only place she could ever think of occupying, next to the watchman who looks after them. (It was Bellamy's idea this day trip. Part of her wonders how he can always be one step ahead. Understand perfectly what they need, distinguishing desire from necessity.)

He hands her the cup of moonshine that he must have set aside for her, she returns the rifle to him. She feels his gaze on her face, she knows he must have noticed her red eyes.

"Are you okay?" Bellamy asks, the stoic expression that doesn’t reveal anything and those eyes that betrays too much.

She nods. The tension abandons his broad shoulders and she feels a sudden rash of fondness. She licks her lips. "You were right," she says, observing the reverberation of the fire, like a beacon, letting herself be lulled by the relaxed atmosphere, by the muffled silence that surrounds them.

Since this is Bellamy, it is no surprise that he immediately understood that she was referring to the way she left him two weeks earlier, abruptly abandoning the conversation. "Clarke, you don't have to do it."

"Yes, I do," she replies and knows it's true. She can't let them live in this kind of limbo. She wraps her fingers around the cup tightly. "You were right. I'm not just scared. I'm terrified. You were there when they tied my mother to that table. You know why Cage did it. It's my fault, it was to get to me. To break me, to try to bend my will. The people I love are perpetually in danger." She meets his eyes. In the halo of orange light that tinges the clearing, the blaze that burns in the night has also reached his eyes. They are like embers torn from the fire. "You and my mother are my weakness."

Bellamy lifts a corner of his mouth in a wry smile. “You know, most people prefer to use the word family, but I can work with it. Flexibility and ability to adapt are just two of my many qualities."

"Didn't you listen to a word of what I said?"

"Yes, and fortunately for both of us I am very good at reading between the lines or I couldn’t do this."

He rests his hands on the sides of her face and when he covers her mouth with his, the contact is firm and secure. He leans her head back to get deeper access. She drops the cup with a thump muted by the blanket. She puts her fingers through his hair and pulls him close to her, with the tip of her tongue she touches his lips, the outline of his incisor teeth. Bellamy groans and it resonates throughout her body, deepens the kiss and bites her lower lip.

"Bellamy," she sighs his name into his mouth, pulling his hair slightly for payback. "You are impossible."

"Thanks." He presses his lips against her throat, she can feel his grin on her skin nibbling, and it makes her shiver. She puts her hands on his chest and senses the vibration of his laughter underneath.

"It wasn't meant to be a compliment." _I can't lose him_ , she thinks abruptly. Losing him would destroy her.

Bellamy makes her down to lie with him then pulls her back in close. Clarke has her head stuck in the hollow space between his neck and shoulder and Bellamy's fingers caress her hair in a constant rhythm. "What can I do?"

"Stay like this a little longer?"

"Whenever the hell you want," he murmurs against her ear, kissing her lobe.

After a while she feels yet again that vibration in Bellamy's chest, his torso shaken by a slight tremor. With her fingers she traces the contours of his nose, the bony cheek, the dimple in his chin, the shape of his mouth firmly arched upwards. "What is it?" he asks.

"You were smiling."

"I suppose so."

"What were you thinking?"

"That I'm your Achilles’ heel," Bellamy replies immediately with a quiet, self-congratulatory smugness.

That’s so typical of him. She is tempted to make a joke about it but gives up. She nuzzles into his neck. "Someday will you tell me all the stories you know?"

"Why wait ‘til tomorrow?" he asks huskily and then, speaking as quietly as he can, as if he were confiding a secret or reading a sonnet, he begins to talk. “Once, a long time ago, there was a girl who had been given the gift of prophecy. Her name was Cassandra and she would soon discover that that so-called gift was nothing but the spite of a cruel god."

When Bellamy says that not being believed protected Cassandra from lust when she was young, Clarke snorts. "A pretty dark bright side, if you ask me."

“Bloody tragic,” he agrees with a chuckle. “Nevermind. Didn't you listen? Men, gods or mortals, even a hero like Theseus, are rats."

"Not all of them," she replies lost in thought and curses when she feels Bellamy's hand stop in her hair. She bites her tongue. "I mean," she tries to fix it, "men can be emotional and sensitive too."

She can practically _hear_ his smirk. "I was talking about how they are often described in mythology."

She pinches him. "Shut up. Go on."

"I get some mixed signals."

"Bellamy," she says warningly.

The stars above them are bright and striking. There was a time, she thinks, in which her eyes would have been focused on the sky and not on the boy who is holding her to remember that their world doesn’t have to be miserable and hopeless, that there is beauty also in the darkness of the blackest night.

There is an irony that doesn’t escape her in the fact that it is right here, where their journey began, their first home, that she has realized it.

"I'm glad you stayed."

She rests her lips in correspondence of his heart. "Me too."

**Author's Note:**

> We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.  
> \- Dag Hammarskjold


End file.
